The quick, cheap path to innovation

An FCW reader says low-cost prototypes make it feasible to test new ideas

By Matt McKnight

Sep 17, 2009

Recent changes to the technology landscape, such as cloud computing, lean/agile development processes, collaboration software and Web-oriented architecture, pose a dilemma for federal agencies: When should they adopt a new technology or process that appears to promise more effective or efficient services? And when should they hold back?

Although innovations offer the government an opportunity to provide new capabilities for less money, they also bring the risk of trying something new that might not work. However, we might face even bigger risks by failing to adopt cheaper, more secure and more user-friendly software and settling for a technology experience at work that is a generation behind what we can do at home. An emergent technology strategy allows the government to take advantage of opportunities while minimizing risks.

Such a strategy supplements a top-down, deliberate technology strategy to introduce new ideas to organizations. It arises from the successful tactical operations of the organization. We take small steps, measure the results and feed that information into the deliberate strategy. The approach allows for what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen calls disruptive innovations — low-cost options that can move up-market to thrive.

For example, by building a cheap prototype of a system using free software such as Ruby on Rails, an organization can establish the value of a system and gain information from user feedback with minimal risk. It can measure successes and failures and adjust the strategy accordingly.

One constant request of mission managers in the government is that information technology projects deliver on time and within budget — with or without the use of new technologies. However, the process of inventing a new system is not predictable to a high degree of precision at the outset of a new project because there are often no analogous projects to use as a baseline for estimation. Susan Cramm, writing on her blog at the Harvard Business Review, suggests that many IT projects have “evolved beyond automating manual processes to changing how we think and behave” in unpredictable ways.

Cramm encourages us to adopt an incremental approach and treat the initial phase as an experiment in which we gather data on the benefits of the project and refine our cost estimates. That exploratory mind-set is needed to deal with new technologies and innovative solutions that use existing technologies.

It is much easier to take a small success, replicate it and scale it across an agency than it is to determine a prescriptive approach before implementation and bet the future on a single must-succeed project.

By using projects as laboratories from which we collect successful approaches and use them to enhance our deliberate strategies, enterprises can function as learning organizations that base decisions on real results.

When successful technologies and approaches emerge from project teams, it is not appropriate to declare victory and mandate homogeneity across the enterprise. Adopting an emergent technology strategy within a larger deliberate structure provides a way to pursue the successful innovations that will ultimately elicit superior performance from the government.